The Multipolarisation of the World

The largely peaceful or at least predictable world order of the long decade of the 1990s is now a thing of the past: neither international organisations nor the USA as erstwhile sole superpower are able to suppress military conflicts like the one in Ukraine. The West seems divided. New powers are entering the arena, and trade wars are posing major problems for export-oriented countries like Germany.

In this essay, Volker Perthes – a former UN diplomat and long-serving director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs – offers an assessment and overview of this situation. Perthes argues that we are living in an age marked by multipolarisation. In the wake of the Cold War and the Pax Americana, today, five strong poles dominate global politics – with the EU, Russia, and India joining the USA and China. Drawing on examples from the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Perthes shows how mid-sized regional powers are able to play these big actors off against one another, allowing them to exert a strong influence on their immediate neighbours. In light of this, the EU needs to strengthen its ability to act if it wants to avoid being pulled between other poles.